David Chalmers
David Chalmers considers the consciousness of rocks as well as thermostats, although he eschews the notion that rocks are conscious:
- "I do not think it is strictly accurate to say that rocks (for example) have experiences . . . although rocks may have experiences associated with them. ... Personally, I am much more confident of naturalistic dualism than I am of panpsychism. The latter issue seems to be very much open. But I hope to have said enough to show that we ought to take the possibility of some sort of panpsychism seriously: there seem to be no knockdown arguments against the view, and there are various positive reasons why one might embrace it." (Chalmers 1996:299)
In his 2002 Consciousness and its Place in Nature, Chalmers carefully considers neutral monism and panpsychism, variants of what he calls "Type-F Monism". He admits that
- "The type-F view is admittedly speculative and it can sound strange at first hearing. Many find it extremely counterintuitive to suppose that fundamental physical systems have phenomenal properties: e.g. that there is something it is like to be an electron".
Read more about this topic: Neutral Monism
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“Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp’s rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,—a Sharp’s rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)